Not a Potted Plant

Cultures that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality die. The dying gasps of all empires, from the Aztecs to the ancient Romans to the French monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have been characterized by a disconnect between the elites and reality. The elites were blinded by absurd fantasies of omnipotence and power that doomed their civilizations.

* * *

It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extemism.

– Chris Hedges

…we feel always a sort of mental superiority over those whose lives we know better than they suppose.

— Pere Alexandre Dumas

Note: Elliot Grant is a pseudonym, but this refers to a real case. People who follow such things may even be able to identify which one. If so, I kindly ask that you do not reference it, as that would include personal information on where I grew up, where my father worked, and so on.

My parents, as they go to bed, turn on the TV and watch Leno. It’s part of their ritual. My ritual is slightly different: I turn on the DVR and watch some non-arching crime show. Law & Order got a lot of viewing this way. Since I’ve seen so many of those, though, I’ve drifted to Cold Case, Numb3rs, Flashpoint, and other shows of the sort. One crime show that I never got into as much was Criminal Minds, though I’ll watch it when I want a sure-fire haven’t-seen-this-before episode of something. I’ve always found something about the show off-putting. Some of it relates to Elliot Grant.

One day, somebody found a dead body on a huge plot of land. They looked further, and they found more dead bodies (all women). The local PD decided that they had a serial killer and asked the FBI for a profile. The FBI sent one back. The type you would generally expect: loner, has trouble with women, possibly this, probably that. And from that point, nearly everything Grant did fit that profile. He was initially very cooperative, just as the killer would be. Then, once realizing that the police were looking at him, became very uncooperative, just as the killer would do. They found pornography on his computer, which the killer would have.

I am not entirely a fully impartial narrator. Though I don’t think I ever met Grant, he was an employee of my father’s. My father tends to be a very good judge of character, and my father found the notion that Grant was a serial killer to be absurd. And so I, too, am inclined towards disbelief. Not all that many people were. The newspapers ran his face, asking if Elliot Grant was getting away with murder. The father of one of the victims began terrorizing him, trespassing and leaving threatening phone calls (the police would tell him to stop and/or leave the property, but never prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law).

The only thing that the police lacked was proof. Any proof. They searched his house and his ranch and found not a thing (but they wouldn’t, said the profilers, because the killer would be meticulous). Eventually Grant went on television and took a lie detector test administered by a former FBI muckity-muck (the police had asked him to take one, but he had declined because he did not trust the police), which he passed on the question of whether he did it or had any knowledge of who did (he did lie about something less germane, however). This was enough for the FBI, who said that as far as they were concerned, Grant was cleared. The local PD disagreed.

For the next several years, any time a girl went missing, they would turn his ranch upside down and re-search his house. His name would be mentioned in the press again. Elliot Grant got another one. Unless they found the girl, in which case he didn’t.

About half a decade ago, for the first time in a few years, another girl went missing. Elliot Grant killed himself.

There are people that, to this day, believe that Grant was guilty. His death was only emblematic of the fact that he couldn’t live with the guilt. The detective in charge of the case conceded, who had been unmoved by Grant’s death, that Grant may have done it or may not have done it. The father that had terrorized him said the same (and that he regrets terrorizing him). To be sure, there is no proof that Grant didn’t do it. But the strength of the case against him relied partially that his land was where the bodies were found and largely on the profile.

And so… a show about profilers doesn’t excite me all that much. It’s not unlike how Law & Order SVU and Without a Trace are – to me – emblematic of our culture of paranoia surrounding sex and children and therefore less enjoyable to me.

Until yesterday, the United States Men’s National Team had a record of 0-7-3 against Italy. That all changed very late last night with a 1:0 victory at Genoa — making the United States the first time in I don’t even know how long to beat the Azzuri in Italy, and the first time ever the United States has beaten the four-time world champions. Normally, I root for the Azzuri, except when they play the U.S.A. This doesn’t establish U.S.A. as the team to beat from the North American conference for Brazil in 2014 — that’s two years in the future and Mexico is traditionally stronger than the U.S.A. anyway — but it does boost the Stars and Stripes’ street cred.

Jason and Russell have some Big Thoughts about the future fate of mankind. And Russell beat me to making a call-out to one of the Biggest Thoughts of them all. So instead, I’ll offer this: I have always been more immediately scared and concerned about the final exchange of Colossus: The Forbin Project than issues of grand cosmic fate and entropy. I fear that in that final exchange, Colossus’ assessment of human nature is right and thus so is its prediction. Dr. Forbin gets the last word, but the only use to which he can put it is to announce his own obsolescence.

It takes a lot of energy to spend an entire evening with someone who can’t understand anything you’re saying.

– David Farley

If you looked down upon the world from above, like an albatross, you might phant’sy there was some sameness among the people crowding the land below you. But we are not albatrosses, we see the world from ground level, from within our own bodies, through our own eyes, each with our own frame of reference, which changes as we move about, and as others move about us.

– Neal Stephenson

“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”

“That is the only time a man can be brave.”

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“A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.”

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“Sometimes I think everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending is how you get brave, I don’t know.”

– George R.R. Martin

One of the nicer treats I got in Italy last year was lemon soda. It’s ridiculously easy to make yourself: two ounces of simple syrup, four ounces of lemon juice, and six ounces of club soda, served over ice in a pint glass. Stir well (the syrup sinks to the bottom on its own) and enjoy. The lemon juice from concentrate grocery stores sell for cheap works just fine.

Why this stuff doesn’t sell here in the States I’ll never know. We like soda here, and we like lemonade.

I guess the hard part is making the simple syrup. Boil some water and dissolve one cup of granulated sugar in it at a time while stirring well. When no more sugar goes to solution, stop and let the liquid cool before bottling it. You’ll use this stuff for cocktails as well as soft drinks like lemon soda. Once you have it on hand, you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.

Leap Year Day is coming up.

When I first became Trumwill, Will Truman, instead of the blogging and commenting that I had done under my previous name, one of my main concerns is that people would quickly figure out who I was. Because of my early blogging topics, which included complaining about my employer and the local Mormon culture, that was not something I wanted to happen. So I wove in a few fictions with fact (and, of course, created an alternate map of the United States). I’ve since abandoned most of these things (and the ones I haven’t are true in their own way, if not entirely factually accurate).

Anyhow, one of the early fictions was shifting my birthday and being a couple years older than I actually am. I was actually relatively methodical about it, taking on the would-be birthday of the brother I did not have (whose name, incidentally, was to be William – my fictitious middle name is his, as well). As it turned out, the older brother that my mother miscarried was to be born on Leap Year Day in 1976. Thus making the construct of Will Truman not a couple years older than my actual self, but by counting birthdays a quarter of my actual age.

I think of this brother I never had on every LYD, which isn’t often since they only come around every four years. To say that he is the brother I did not have is not entirely accurate. Or maybe it is. My mother has alluded to the fact that had he been born, I never would have. So in an odd way, I owe him my life. I owe a debt to the doctors that might have prevented the miscarriage but did not.

William X was actually to be named after my mother’s brother, William “Herzog”. William Herzog died in an accident when he was a teenager. He was my mother’s only brother and her parents were never the same after that. They descended into alcoholism and left my mother (more or less) to raise her substantially younger siblings until she could hit 18 and leave. Her parents had always wanted sons (in real life, my mother has a boy’s name). They lost the willingness to forgive my mother for being female.

I would not go so far as to say that I am a “black sheep” in the family. I take after my mother in some ways and my fathers than others. My lineage, temperamentally and especially physically, is traceable for the most part. But some aspects of my mind and behavior would be inexplicable. My head’s residence in the clouds doesn’t trace to my mother or my father, really. Even among the artsy types in my family (my mother is a spectacular writer, my great grandfather was an artistic pioneer), there’s always been something a little “off” in comparison with me and the rest of my family. But according to my mother, this was always true of William Herzog. He got cut a lot of slack for being the only boy, but nonetheless. I didn’t know this until well, well after the fact, but my deceased uncle and I both got in trouble in middle school for writing comic books during class.

So I guess it fits that I took his name (or, the name of someone who was given his name) in my writing. With the exception of an uncle on my father’s side, I have had the pleasure to get to know all of my aunts and uncles. The two I most resemble are easily the gray sheep that I didn’t particularly get to know because he went his own way, and the uncle who died well before I was born.